David Eddings: The Belgariad story of a young man growing into unknown powers saving his world.
As far as I remember, the boy was failed, has his son stolen, had a reluctant wife, and ended up having to go to war.
The entire series was amazing though. 15 books? Or was it 10? Belgariad, then another 5 books.
But the "Age of the Five" and "The Magicians Guild".
They would also both make good anime.
The Belgariad (5 books):
Garion grew up on Faldor's farm with his Aunt Pol, befriends the "vagabond" he calls Mr. Wolf, and appearances of a Murgo merchant cause his once-peaceful life to be forced aside as he, his aunt, and "Mr. Wolf" flee from the farm to safety, meeting along the way Silk the Drasnian "merchant" and Barak, the Earl of Trellheim and cousin to the King of Cherek. As events unfold, Garion learns more and more about those in his party and who they really are, and also who and what he really is.
The sequel 5-book series to The Belgariad is titled The Mallorean, and tells of events following the confrontation between the Child of Dark and the Child of Light, and of how there is one last prophecy to be fulfilled before everything's finally over.
As for A Song of Ice and Fire being made into an HBO series, I think that, as with all adaptation productions, it could be either really really good, or be really really bad. If they target the series the same way George R. R. Martin targeted his books (basically to anyone who loved main characters dying like flies, blunt yet humorous descriptions and dialogue, and very very good plot/plot twists) and they kept content censorship to a minimum (obviously the whole Daenerys thing would be considered, uh, out of the question as far as revealing exactly what GRRM wrote and described in his book), add in a cast that closely resembles the characters without too much difference (Would love to see what Tyrion and The Hound look like) and can actually act, (not the hardest of any of these, by far) and remove any "extra touches" that they sometimes like to do, I believe we then have a very nice formula for success...
I think that the first book of the Ender's Saga would be a very good PG-13 movie. They wouldn't really need to take anything out as the story is pretty tame besides some of the dialogue. My only concern would be the whole Valentine/Peter part where they become Desmosthenes and Locke, as that might be above the heads of most kids that would see it because it would be "a kid's movie".
Finally, The Wheel of Time would make a great movie series, with the only problem being the length of the movies. Each book is 700+ pages (with the exception of
New Spring) and the amount of content and dialogue in each would cause the movies to be above and beyond the length of the un-edited Lord of the Rings movies (they took 36+ hours of direct book -> movie content and trimmed it all down to ~9 hours for all 3). Yeah, that would probably work as far as the movie-going experience is concerned, but the true story would probably never be adapted or told at all, leaving many, many people unhappy (though we'd still watch it, just because it's The Wheel of Time). If they made WoT a multiple-season series ala HBO, again, as with A Song of Ice and Fire, it could be either really good or really bad. I think A Song of Ice and Fire would be better because there is much more "sellable" content that WoT, since WoT is more of overall story progression with a few twists and turns and betrayals whereas A Song of Ice and Fire relies more heavily on those twists and turns and betrayals and story progression flows from that. (Basically, it's the same thing but emphasis on different parts of the story; I don't know how clear I can make this sound without being either redundant or just restating what is already known; ie
it's hard to put into words, you'd have to read both to understand)
