The top book of 1923 on Librarything and Goodreads, by a very long way, is The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran. The third chapter, in full, with the original illustration, is as follows:

Children

And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said,
Speak to us of Children.

And he said:
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not
even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent
forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the Archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as he loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is
stable.

I was vaguely aware of this as (I thought) woo-woo spirituality. I was pleased to discover that it is better than that; in particular I thought it rather good on love and personal relationships, and I can see why people who are uncomfortable with any specific religious tradition like to use it for rites of passage, especially weddings.

It’s interesting that all three of the top 1923 books address death as a fundamental part of what they are doing, though I’ll admit that The Prophet is some distance from Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. The second last chapter is explicitly “On Death”, and in the last chapter the Prophet himself bids farewell to the priestess and departs from the city departs in a heavily laden metaphor.

Gibran is not so sound on social and political issues, where the message of the book is to try and find the serenity to accept the things you cannot change, without much thought to finding the courage to change the things you can, or the wisdom to know the difference. You can’t have everything, I suppose.

But it’s short, and digestible, and nicely illustrated by the author, and you can get it here.