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There's a great line from the book Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie where the narrator of the book remarks that (and I'm paraphrasing here), there's loads of ways in the world to be poor, but apparently there's only one way to be rich - indulge in the same 'luxuries'.

Highly recommend her work! I've read Americanah and loved it. My partner read Half of a Yellow Sun and also really enjoyed it.

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is very good. It's fiction, but semi-autobiographical. It's as much about living as a Nigerian immigrant in America as it is about Nigeria, but it's really well-written and gives a ton of insight into Nigerian culture (from a very specific perspective some might find grating.)

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Most recommended:

- Ted Chiang - Stories of Your Life and Others.

- Lawrence Weschler - Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees. A quality biography of Robert Irwin based on interviews over decades, and helps you learn to appreciate minimalist art to boot.

- Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice

- Kurt Vonnegut - Breakfast of Champions

- Burton G. Malkiel - A Random Walk Down Wall Street

- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - Americanah. Saw myself in several of these characters

- Nikos Kazantzakis - Zorba the Greek

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Also good:

- Jack London - John Barleycorn: Alcoholic Memoirs. Illustrates all of the interesting ways in which a person is tempted to drink: when someone else buys you one, when it's cold outside, ...

- Danny Bowien - The Mission Chinese Food Cookbook. Lots of stories between the recipes.

- David Byrne - How Music Works

- Meg Jay - The Defining Decade

- Ernest Hemingway - A Moveable Feast

- Magdalena Droste - Bauhaus 1919-1933

- Arimasa Osawa - Shinjuku Shark

- Zadie Smith - Changing My Mind

- Chinua Achebe - Things Fall Apart

- Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray

- Marie Kondo - The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up

- Haruki Murakami - The Strange Library. A fifteen minute read.

- Tim Ferriss - The Four-Hour Workweek. Good tactics for saving time; bad business advice.

- Kurt Vonnegut - Cat's Cradle

- John Berger - Ways of Seeing

Sure, my Top 5 books by non-whitemen I read in 2014 are:

FICTION

1. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - Americanah
2. Terezia Mora - Der einzige Mann auf dem Kontinent (not translated yet I think)
3. Octavia E. Butler - Parable of the Sower
4. Jose Saramago - Blindness
5. James Baldwin - If Beale Street Could Talk

NONFICTION

1. Melba Patillo Beals - Warriors Don't Cry: The Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock's Central High
2. Sendhil Mullainathan & Eldar Shafir - Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much
3. Laura Fermi - Atoms in the Family: My Life with Enrico Fermi
4. Judith Newton - From Panthers to Promise Keepers: Rethinking the Men's Movement
5. Sikivu Hutchinson - Godless Americana: Race and Religious Rebels

and as a bonus, because it's written by a white man...

Jeffrey Haas - The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther