ISerialize vs. Parse And Set

I have an opinion question for anyone who actually reads this blog.
I need to take an incoming data stream and turn it into a set of objects. At the basic level, this is just a form of serialization.

The incoming text is currently just ASCII over the network and I was entertaining the through of using a StreamReader/StreamWriter to abstract that point. Once I get the text, I currently just parse it and load those properties into a newly created object. This seems like a hack at the conceptual level.

Is there a more appropriate way to do this, like create a custom serializer to transform the text into objects, or am I just spinning my wheels?