Way back in the olden days, I built a lovely reader (inventively called Reader) at Earthlink.

The key feature to Reader was that it did not have unread counts at all. You could flip through the articles and it would keep keep track of where you were. If you left for more than half an hour, the rest of the articles were marked as read.

It was very liberating to not feel like you were ever trying to keep up with your feeds.

These days, Fever App seems the way to go... http://feedafever.com/