I’m currently reading a book called Shoeless Joe which is the book that inspired Field of Dreams. As a big baseball fan it was a must read for me, plus I wasn’t aware it was based on a book until a few years ago.
I finished the Little House books. Always wanted to read them and found them at a flea market. My grandmother loved the show and as a kid I didn’t care about it but as an adult I love it. Always at least a few episodes in my DVR.
There's another book series (not Manga) that turned anime that I absolutely admire too and that's The Legend of the Galactic Heroes. It is a space epic of space epics! There are so many well written characters with such a well written history. I'm quite surprised at how well the author treats military characters, you got officers with good by the book conduct to military crayon eaters. It all feels like the author has done his research.
The scale of the fleet battles are wild too with fleets of tens-of-thousands ships engaging each other. There's plenty of cool sci-fi gizmos like power armor being so powerful that everyone has gone back to melee fighting. Yet despite all the tech lore in it, the driving factor is still the characters, some sci-fi focus too much on the "stuff and things" to be interesting.
If you just want to watch the anime series, there is a older 1980s series and 2020 series....I encourage them both! The 2020 series goes by events a little faster, which oddly goes into its favor, as the books didn't drag out events like the 1980s series did. The 1980s series though is also very well detailed. I personally favor the 2020 series more because of how it handled one specific event that makes it accurate to the books but that is major spoilers.
That’s one I really want to read and watch