I'm a big fan of the His Dark Materials trilogy. They were pretty dark considering they're apparently sposed to be kids books. I liked the whole religion is the villain angle too.
I'm currently re-reading the wheel of time books now that Knife of Dreams is out in paperback. Its been 2 years since I read Crossroads of Twilight so now the only thing I really remember is how I felt about each book.
1:Good, 2: Really good, 3: Good, 4:Pretty good, 5: Pretty good, 6: OK, 7: OK, 8: OK, 9:Half Decent, 10: 800 pages of nothing.
Apparently the new one makes up for book 10 though.