It doesn't matter to me which kind of setting I read about (real or made up) as long as it's compelling. Some of my own stories are set in real places, but my plots don't typically center around a certain place so it's easy for me to neglect specifics of a place. For my current novel, I'm setting it in south central Minnesota, about 40 minutes south of St. Paul. My setting is not a real place but it's going to be based on real cities in that area.

It doesn't bother me too much, but one thing that irks me a bit is when writers use a real place but are inaccurate in their "facts" about it. For instance, I read a book where the characters went through my actual home town. They mentioned stopping at a Target in this city. Well, we don't have a Target here and we never have. It was a good guess on the author's part as there are Targets in most significantly sized cities (at least around here), but clearly he hadn't done his research on this particular city. It wasn't a huge deal to me, but I know a lot of people are bothered by that sort of thing.