this weekend i'm reading King Dork. i read the back cover and the intro page before i actually bought it and i thought it was pretty interesting. but now i'm half-screaming quietly at myself for even thinking that.

i think it's very pretentious, more like a failed attempt at reviving the glory of Holden Caulfield and making him a little more appealing to non-prepschool kids. but you really can't resurrect Holden Caulfield, if that's what you're trying to get at, not that he's dead or anything, but i really think it's sacrilegious.

what really got me, mind you in the first 100 pages that i read, was the way Tom Henderson tells you that his sister is nothing like Phoebe Caulfield but in the same breath he starts describing her almost exactly the way Holden talks about his kid sister. if you're trying to pull some douche-bag-y trick like that, at least do it on a different page, not in the same sentence where it's really obvious that you don't know what you're talking about. i understand this whole pathological liar/exaggeration business, but it just kills me that Tom is so unoriginal.

but i think i should blame the author for that. obviously, King Dork is just like a copy of The Catcher in the Rye with a rock and roll twist. and the lingo is a tad bit different too, like they say "fuck" instead of "give her the time" and "shit" instead of "goddam." but other than that, it's pretty much a plagiarized book, done horribly to the core. some paragraphs even sound like an exact copy of passages from Catcher. it's annoying. it tries so hard to be interesting, even going through the lengths of borderline plagiarism, that it loses its own story, its own voice, its own hero whose life is supposedly changed by finding his dad's old copy of Catcher. but a hundred pages into the book and i still haven't found any growth (or decay, how ever you want to look at it).

but we'll see. i still have a couple hundred pages to read. but for right now, there's no way Tom Henderson will make it to my Book Hero List.