Will you seriously not read a book if the speech is in single quotation marks? Do you import all of your books from America? I just took a random sample of ten novels, and all but one used single quotation marks for speech. Single quotes have the 'wait, is that a closing inverted comma or just an apostrophe?' problem, but beyond that they don't bother me on paper.

Single quotation marks in fic do strike me as a bit odd, though, perhaps because I've come to expect a certain type of punctuation on the screen.

(I always use single quotes when I'm writing by hand, but I suspect that may largely be due to laziness.)