Popular Novels

If you enjoy reading, there is nothing worse than starting a novel and thinking right away "this is not good", but you want to give it the benefit of the doubt so you keep reading.  Now you are in the middle of the book and feel you have gone this far and maybe it will get better. Now you are at the end and feel like you just wasted hours on a very poorly written novel.
So can we say that all literature is the same? Of course not. So what makes a novel popular? When we find an author that we really enjoy we will want to read their other books. This makes them popular to us personally. We may realize though that you enjoyed one of their novels but the others are not as enjoyable or you may not like the plot.
We also have the help of famous people creating book clubs or lists of novels they would recommend. You may take the time and read a couple from their list or suggestions. If you agree with their choices then you may decide that they have the same interests as you and from that point you think they are good choices and you will continue to read their novel suggestions.
We may trust a newspaper's choices or critiques of novels. This can be helpful if they introduce us to a new author as they are given samples to read and review. This process can help us find new novels to read and hopefully enjoy. And again we may then be introduced to an up and coming author and we will look forward to their new works of literature.
If we are involved in a book club with friends this too can introduce us to new genres of novels. These can be classic literature, current popular authors or a novel that is all the buzz. You could join a romance novel book club or a mystery novel book club - the possibilities are endless.  When we read a book with a club the point is to come together and discuss it. From this situation we can find that even though a novel is popular doesn't mean everyone will feel the same way. This process can help you identify what genres you enjoy reading too.
With these different avenues available to help you select what novel to read, it will hopefully help you see that what may be popular to some doesn't necessarily mean you will like it. That is why there are so many genres available - so we can find one we enjoy and look in that category and see what is popular and open up another path of novels.  Maybe you don't like erotic novels, but you enjoy historical fiction and you like romance.  What about historical romance novels?  Once you start doing research into the genre you like, you will find there are so many branches of each one that it is nearly impossible to be a fan of all of them.
Literature is so diverse, and maybe that is what makes us keep coming back for more.  Will it stop me from finding books that I hope will be good and they still disappoint me?  No.  But that won't stop me from starting another one.