For what you're trying to do, the only thing I can think of is to explode the magazine into separate articles.
Our sample mag is: Woodworking Today, Jul 2014 issue with it's 5 articles: Shed, Table, Desk, Bookshelf, Tobogan.
Entered into calibre as a standard book, The title and issue would be entered as the title (most likely) with various tags/keywords based on the included articles being entered for the magazine as a whole. You might include a ToC in the Description field to help with searches. Author would be blank or ambiguous ("Varies") due to multiple authors and no good way to cite them. I'm sure the above is exactly why you questioned this matter.
But if you explode the magazine you get finer and more accurate detail - at the expense of a lot more data entry. You would enter each article as if it was a separate book:
Code:
Title Author Series Tags Published #Magazine
Desk Danny Dobson -- Desk, Oak Jul 2014 Woodworking Today
Table Thomas Terney Arts & Crafts Style Desk [1] Arts & Crafts, Table Jul 2014 Woodworking Today
Just give some consideration to the types of things you would need to know about an article in order to be able to re-locate it later on.
Most of these things may end up being tags, but a few might lead to distinct custom columns. For instance the wood used generally isn't a critical aspect of an article, so that can be a tag. That single mahogany and burlwood desk project will jump out at you when you enter those two wood types as tags. Alternately, you might find a lot of Seasonal or Occasion items like the Tobogan article, or a Crib. Creating a custom column #Occasion might allow you to group things in a more logical fashion. (But a seasonal or occasion tag would work just fine here, as well.)
As for your second concern, marking a book for later reading, you could use Rating to indicate your level of interest in the article (0=none, 5=Make this now). Or you could come up with various custom usage columns: Build it? Y/N; Thoughts? <comments field>; etc.
But the Reading List plugin might be a better option. (Note that I haven't used that plugin so I might not understand it's intended purpose.)