I am really retro, but I have kept a hand written book journal since January 1, 2011. Every book I have read since then (100+/year) in order, title and author. I mark the ones I especially like.
I go through the list at the end of each year and add the marked ones to a list I keep as a word doc. That’s the list I send to people who are looking for recommendations.
This system might not work for anyone else, but it works for me.
One of my reasons for keeping the online book journal is that for the automatic recommendations. “People who liked this book also liked…”, “New releases from authors you’ve read”, etc.
@FallGirl I’ve got a written list (small journal) of the books I read too, but I’m not as organized as you are with it. I just write the titles down as I read them–only thing that distinguishes the entries is the year. I’ve probably kept the list for 3 years.
Just started every note played - divorced couple with college aged daughter - fits the description
Anne Tyler - ladder of years- middle aged woman starts a new life -
I really don’t want to do a spoiler for Ladder of Years - which I loved party because she’s going to the same stretch of beach we went to for years, but…
SPOILER!
She ended up with just about the same life as she started out with. right?
^ Ladder of years one of few books I’ve read twice 20 years apart. As o recall the beach was Ocean City Maryland or Rehobeth ? It’s a woman who has a mid life crisis, and @mathmom I will private message you my recollection of the ending
I think it was Rehobeth - we went their a few times and then more often to Dewey Beach which is just south of there. I loved Ladder of Years and would recommend it.
^ sent you pm about the book
I need to reread that. One of my favorite Ann Tyler’s. Also, I hadn’t been to that area when I read it last, and now I bike there from Jersey (via the ferry) every summer so I’ll be able to picture things better.
Ladder of Years is one of my favorites, which is why I mentioned it a few weeks ago in this thread. 
My book club just read The Chaperone by Laura Moriarty, which has a female middle-age protagonist. It was a hit!
It looks like both Anne Tyler and Barbara Kingsolver’s new novels will have middle-aged women. Two of my favorite authors!
I randomly picked up “A Year at Ladybug Farm” by Donna Ball at the library. I wasn’t sure if it would be any good and I still debate about the quality of writing, but something about the story really got me and now I’ve read the whole series. They’re quick reads but the main characters are middle aged (or maybe technically older if you consider the halfway point of an average lifespan middle aged) women.
Javier Marias is a first-rank literary author in Spanish. His last two books have had central female characters.
The penultimate one, Thus Bad Begins, does not exactly have a middle-aged woman as its protagonist – the protagonist/narrator is a man who for most of the novel is in his early twenties. However, a middle-aged woman (with teenaged children) is the focus of a lot of his attention, and her behavior and its motivation the central problem of the novel. Furthermore, the narrative voice is that of a man in older middle age (at least – Marias is in his early 60s) recalling his youth, so that the issues the novel addresses are the issues of full adulthood, as seen both by youth and by those who have lived them fully.
His most recent novel, Berta Isla, does not come out in English until this fall, I think. It’s a story about a couple, from their high school years into their early forties (which in the context of this book is clearly meant to be middle age), with the twist that they spend most of their time apart with little or no communication. The man (and husband and father) is a spy, who often vanishes for long, indeterminate stretches of time with little or no explanation. One of his absences eventually seems permanent, although it’s never clear until late in the book whether he has died or not. As a result, the majority of the book focuses on the female half of the couple, and especially on her transition from young mother/wife to an independent professional woman coping with loss, deception, and ambiguity.
Sticking to Hispanic literature, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s late masterpiece Love In The Time Of Cholera devotes a great deal of attention to a courtship between a man and a woman who are probably in their 60s (although it also deals with their courtship when they were a lot younger than that, too, and in more summary fashion with the intervening years as well). His early masterpiece, One Hundred Years Of Solitude, does not really have any single (or double) protagonist. It’s a sprawling family history with dozens of memorable characters, several of whom spend a good deal of time as middle-aged women (as well as in most cases also as children, young women, and old women).
They aren’t novels, but I really liked a couple of memoirs written in the 1980s by a woman called Emma Fisk. One is called Parrots’ Wood, and the other is The Peacocks Of Babaquivari. She wrote then when she was in her 70s.
Might have been mentioned already: “Mrs. Fletcher” by Tom Perrotta.
I read Mrs. Fletcher and liked it to a point (especially the son going off to college, empty nest theme), but there’s other parts I didn’t care for (and neither does CC, apparently, since it wouldn’t post my post no matter how inoffensively I thought I worded it). Anyhow, I heard that HBO (I think) is considering making a series of the book. Tom Perrotta’s other book The Leftovers was also made into a series.
I know what you mean, @Barbalot.
I think I’m now reading the quintessential midlife novel, How Hard Can It Be? by Allison Pearson. She’s the one who wrote I Don’t Know How She Does It, which was about the protagonist, Kate’s, travails of working in a high-stress job with small kids. Her fictional daughter and mine were both born in 1997, so I could really relate.
So now Kate, 49, is back with menopause and back fat and snarly teens, and I’m really enjoying it so far.