You can buy Lord of the Rings as a single bound hardcover roughly 1200 pages. The paper is thin, its only about 2 inches thick. I'm thinking of the 50th anniversary edition. In terms of total amount of lifetime "wasted" playing DnD/Pathfinder and derivatives offline, plus infinite hours of computer fantasy RPGs plus perhaps the whole concept of RPGs in general, it probably has the largest impact in terms of hours spent thinking about the concept.
I can't provide a specific link but something only 70s/80s kids will understand is when I was about five and I finished reading every Tom Swift book ever written (as of that decade, anyway) I spent most of a week reading an entire single volume encyclopedia, trying to figure out how it all works together, or not. Before wikipedia, before "multimedia cdrom" encyclopedia, there were multi volume collections and large single volume collections. I'll push the limit and claim reading an encyclopedia entry about Kant or Impressionism or Bach or the american civil war isn't technical in the sense of "programming C" is technical. I admit there were technical articles in the book. It was weird reading a 60s liberal arts article about computers when I had an early TRS-80 home computer on my dad's desk.