We love hearing about the books our local readers have picked up for the Mid Sussex Reading Challenge – and we love finding out what inspires you to choose each challenge read! Last month, Claire from Hassocks chose a book that has been adapted into a Netflix film. I Heard You Paint Houses by Charles Brandt was released in 2019 as The Irishman, directed by Martin Scorcese and starring Robert de Niro and Al Pacino. The non-fiction book on which The Irishman was based was published in 2004 and chronicles the life of a mafia hitman, written by a homicide prosecutor and investigator.
Read on for Claire’s review!
Rating: 4 out of 5
This true story of the so-called ‘Biggest Hit in Mob History’ – the officially unsolved disappearance (murder) of the legendary Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa – held me throughout its mixture of the horrific and the banal as the ‘Painter of Houses’ (in blood) of the title talks to Charles Brandt, a well known American lawyer. The story that unfolds shocks not merely by the dispassionate attitude of the various mobsters to murder – all part of the business – but even more perhaps by the revelations of political support at the very highest level.
This is not a book that I would normally have been drawn to, but I found the remit of this first challenge quite taxing, since I presumed it would require me to read a book I had not read before which had been made into a film which I had seen. However, I had recently seen and been impressed by Martin Scorsese’s ‘The Irishman’, with its powerful cast including Al Pacino as Jimmy Hoffa and Robert De Niro as the eponymous Irishman Frank Sheeran, the ‘Painter of Houses’.
I ticked the box to rate my ‘enjoyment’ of the book as 4 out of 5, but of course this is not a book to ‘enjoy’ at all. Read it and be appalled.
If you’d like to read I Heard You Paint Houses, reserve your copy via our library catalogue!
Did you read a fantastic book in January? Let us know!
Mid Sussex Reading Challenge 2020 