MoodReads - Romance Book Discovery
Jenny and James on a hike

hey! I'm Jenny

the girl behind MoodReads

I built MoodReads because I was losing my mind trying to pick what to read from my own TBR. It's like sleepy Netflix scrolling. I have 800 books on my TBR and I spend two hours scrolling instead of reading.

We know what we want. Kinda. Something spicy but not too heavy, maybe with found family, definitely a slow burn, first person POV with an audiobook. Full cast audiobook, if possible. But no app lets you filter by all of that.

Goodreads clutches their pearls over spice. StoryGraph is great but still limited when it comes to romantasy filtering. romance.io is the holy grail for helping you find NEW books but what about your ten-years-in-the-making TBR that just needs a little dusting off and a little love?

It started as a Notion board with 50 books and 150 columns.

notion.so
The original MoodReads Notion board with columns for mood, tone, pacing, energy required, and spice level

I tried to do every genre at first and then I quickly learned what scope is (lol). It turns out 150 columns and an overreaching sense of overwhelm is a sign you should pick a lane. So, I picked romantasy, because that's where my TBR mostly lives, and narrowed it down to the fields that matter to us: mood, tone, pacing, energy required, spice content, POV, rep, trigger warnings, archetypes, and… well, it was easy to get carried away. I scoped it down to 15 fields and we ended up with 40. Win some, lose some. 💜

Then I was walking my dog and it hit me that I probably wasn't the only one with this problem. Right? RIGHT?

So, fuck it, we rode.

join the community, talk about books, skip the noise. that's it. that's the plot.

When I'm not obsessively tagging books, I'm serving at a pizza place, doing yoga, biking, cooking (re: adding butter), hiking & camping on the North Carolina coast, & being bossed around by my dog & cat. I live with my boyfriend who has learned to accept that "just one more chapter" means at least three and that lately I stay up til 5 AM developing "just one more thing" when I should probably be sleeping. 💀

I'm a reader first, builder second. I use MoodReads to pick my own books—the mood and energy tags exist because I kept forgetting which books on my TBR were the cozy comfort reads and which ones would emotionally destroy me.

MoodReads is a one-person operation. The Notion board turned into a Chrome extension, the Chrome extension turned into a web app, and the web app is turning into an iOS app. Nearly 4,000 romantasy books tagged with 40+ fields each and growing every week. If something's broken or you have an idea, I'm @moodreads.app everywhere and I read every DM.

~4,000

books tagged

40+

fields per book

1

slightly unhinged builder