It may actually be easier to do the (meditation) practice and see for yourself rather than looking for scholarly books. A number of the scholarly books are written by people who do not practice, and so there exist distortions to their words. Reading something like Tibetan Book of the Dead may not be terribly helpful if you are not also practicing too.

A good intro to this frame of mind (and also relevant, since the dude works at Google ;) ) is to watch this video of a talk by Chade-Meng Tan - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8fcqrNO7so

And then if that interests you, see if you get through this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nwwKbM_vJc

First time I heard of "Search Inside of Yourself" -- the video is cool :-)

I like Daniel Ingram's approach. He has a strong focus on the essence, and bypasses a lot of Buddhist dogma that seems to get in the way for westerners.

http://www.dharmaoverground.org/web/guest/dharma-wiki/-/wiki...

There's also a good book coming at the same subject from a more Western, scientific angle: The User Illusion by Tor Nørretranders. It comes to similar conclusions about the "self" as Buddhism.

A very good start is the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, but there are a lot of great books out there on these topics.

I think the best first book to read on Buddhism would just be The Heart of Understanding by Thich Nhat Hanh. The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying is really good, but I would read that next. It's much longer, and although parts of it are really insightful, there are also large sections that are repetitive or esoteric. It's also about ideas and practices that are important to Tibetan buddhism, but that aren't central to most other forms of buddhism.

I know it's a completely different arena, but how do you feel about Hesse's Siddhartha?

I haven't read it, but it seems cool.