Goodwill Releases an End of Year List: Top 5 Most Donated Novels of 2022
It's Year End List Season, Baby!
There's nothing better than getting inundated with everyone's "Year End Best Lists" of 2022, from Pitchfork's 50 Best Albums to Rolling Stone's 20 Best Shows. Don't forget The New Yorker's Best Movies of the Year or Vulture's Best Podcasts of 2022.
Of course, there are no lists more important than the "Best Books" of 2022, and we here at MF have been creating TBR lists of just about everything we missed being recommended by The New York Times 10 Best Books to Time Magazine's Must Read Books.
However, this year our main attention has turned to the list released recently by nonprofit Goodwill Industries International. Earlier this week they got into the Year End List game, releasing their Most Donated Novels of 2022 list.
Now aside from providing skills training, career counseling, and a place for people on probation to work off their time, with this list Goodwill has set themselves up as the leading publishing choicemaker.
"It's fascinating. There seems to be an endless stream of people saying 'I want to read the Da Vinci Code,' then do, and then say 'I must get rid of it.'"
"This year we really wanted to track which titles readers can no longer want on their shelves at home," said John Nadeau, CEO of Goodwill Industries. "The fact that they can no longer stand the sight of these books so much that they will make the drive to drop them off at our store is actually astounding."
"We were very interested to see what these books were," continued Nadeau. "Once the list was released, I couldn't wait to see how many I have donated myself!"
In developing their list, Goodwill polled all 3,300 retail stores in the United States, a crazy feat unto itself considering most Goodwills just sort by Fiction, Nonfiction, or Cookbooks.
Furthermore, the list only includes individual titles, so while random, forgettable John Grisham novels are obviously the most donated to all Goodwills, there isn't one specific novel that could take the coveted number one spot.
Also, an honorable mention also goes out to James Frey's A Million Little Pieces. While this controversial 2003 memoir/semi-fictional novel can be seen in any Fiction section of literally every Goodwill in America, donations have topped off and the books largely just sit on untouched on the shelves with donations no longer coming in.
So, without further ado, this year's list:
5. Water-damaged hardcovers of Breaking Dawn (Stephenie Meyer, 2008)
4. Did Not Finish copies of Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine (Gail Honeyman, 2018)
3. Never-opened hardcovers of The Corrections (Jonathan Franzen, 2001)
2. Battered paperbacks of the American Edition Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (JK Rowling, 1999)
And perhaps unsurprisingly, coming in at Number One, both hardcover and paperback copies in various states of disrepair, Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code (2003).
"You could see that one coming," said Nadeau. "We have so many copies of that book that we just fill up bags with them and have to leave them at other store's donation bins."
But what's most interesting is that according to Nadeau, this is also one of the best sellers in Goodwills across the country. This means the book is constantly coming and going, making it part of some bigger exercise where consumers feel compelled to read and immediately recycle it.
"It's fascinating. There seems to be an endless stream of people saying 'I want to read the Da Vinci Code,' then do, and then say 'I must get rid of it.'"