Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Unless your category pages pull together a group of products that formulate some sort of unique point of view that benefits the sales process, then there's no real reason for your category pages to stand out, in which case, minimize their overall impact on search and focus on making your individual product pages stand out in search. Do you actually get so many return visitors coming to the site looking for what's new since the last time they were there that you need a "new products" category? How about "hot products", are visitors indicating that they are at your site to find out what others are actively buying?  I wonder. If you were able to come up with categories that actually add value to the visitor experience, I'd be willing to bet that you wouldn't have this canonicalization  issue or this pagination issue.  In the mean time, what you describe might be the best way of doing it.