How to prevent Lion Mail from marking a message as read after deleting/archiving another message

This is driving me nuts. I go through my mail in reverse chronological order. This means I look at the newest mails first and then go back from there. So this scenario happens dozens of times a day:

1. Check out message, decide to mark it as unread to review/act on later
2. Proceed to next, older, message
3. When I decide to delete/archive the current message, Mail will highlight the message from 1. and mark it as read (because it is selected)
4. This forces me to REmark this last message as unread before proceeding

Any ideas on how to solve this?