I manage all my books with Calibre and just load batches of books that I think I might want to read in the near future onto my Kindle - probably about 40 books or so on the reader at any given time, so I have a fair few to choose from.
I only have one particular Collection on the reader and that is named Read. Once a book is finished I move it to that collection. I rarely delete books.
I do have a Read custom column in Calibre but I can forget to update that

so I can refer to my Read Collection on the reader to tidy things up.
Before I began using the Goodreads reading challenge (I only started that for 2015) my Read Collection was the only reliable way for me to assess my reading progress.