Site navigation problem

Hi

I have an academic website, which is divided into sections — Books, Articles, Conferences, etc — some of which have several subpages (e.g., for individual books). Where a section has subpages, I used to have a parent page, with links to the subpages. However, I decided that these parent pages were redundant, since the menu bar displays direct links to the subpages on hovering over the parent menu item. So I deleted the parent pages and made the parent menu items not clickable. All good!

*However*, I now want to add a front page to the site with short introductions to each section and clickable icons (for Books, Articles, etc). This will only list the main sections, not the individual pages. So here’s my problem: Where a section has subpages, what can the section icon link to? For example, what can the Books icon link to? It can’t link to the page for an individual book, and there’s no generic books page any more.

Does anyone have any bright ideas, please (short of re-instating the redundant section pages)? 🙂 It would be really cool if hovering over the Books icon brought up a small popup menu of the Books subpages, but I can’t find any way of doing that. (To make matters more complicated, the front page is in a table layout created with Tablepress.)

I’d be very grateful for any help. Thanks!
Kit