Using Books for related/series type content

Hi all,

I am trying to build a blog using Drupal 7.
I have a requirement wherein I'd like to create some articles/posts which might be part of a series of articles.

I'd initially thought of using a special taxonomy vocabulary called 'Series' to group together articles of a series using a common term for this vocabulary. And use views to list all related articles.

For example, I might write a series of articles on setting up a blog in drupal. I want to be able to list all other articles of this series on the individual article pages of this series.

But then it stuck me that using a book is a better way to achieve this. I can just create a book and keep adding articles of a series to the same book. And the book navigation block lists all articles from this book on relevant pages.
Only problem is when I add the first article of a series to a new book, it becomes the top level page of the book and each subsequent article will be a sub section of this first book/article.
Instead is there a way to add an article to a new book, the top level page of which is just an index of all future pages that will be added to this book?

Right now I'd have to create a dummy book page/article with the title of the series, and only after that start writing and adding articles/pages to this top level dummy book page.

It's there a more elegant way to accomplish what I want?
I'd really like to stick to the book approach rather than introduce another vocabulary for this.