Personally, it depends. For doing anything somewhat complicated I usually prefer raw SQL - more compact, generally far more flexible, and I can trivially do dangerous crap like string interpolation. Translating the end result to objects is usually pretty simple. With a few exceptions, this has been for specific performance boosting hacks in bottlenecks, and site-wide statistics displays.
For anything simple, I vastly prefer ORMs. Joins and single selects are incredibly verbose and error-prone compared to "user.books" and "user.address" or the equivalent, and the added layer of abstraction means it's easier to modify the table without modifying code.
For anything simple, I vastly prefer ORMs. Joins and single selects are incredibly verbose and error-prone compared to "user.books" and "user.address" or the equivalent, and the added layer of abstraction means it's easier to modify the table without modifying code.