Death of a Salesman and Babbitt

I've been meaning to read these two for a long time. The reviews didn't particularly interest me but they've both gotten a lot of attention over the years and I was curious to know the stories. I began enthusiastically enough, lost interest part way through both, and had to force myself to finish them.  

Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller is a play about the mental decline of Willy Loman as his disappointments pile up and his dreams slip away. Willy lives with an illusion of life as he'd like it to be, but his reality is far different and facing it is more than he can take. The few pages of this book are filled with enough emotional pain, anger and sadness to haunt me for a while I think. I'd like to see the play performed - maybe there's a film I can watch - because I'm not convinced I have sufficient imagination to be a good reader of plays. Nevertheless, my goal was to find out what the story was about and I have done that.

Babbit by Sinclair Lewis was described in reviews as a "satire of middle class American life", and a "comic novel of mid-life crisis". I listened to an audio version, which usually helps me get through books I'm not looking forward to reading, but oh, my, I found it dull. And not very funny, or even funny at all. George Babbitt is an unlikable character in a book filled with unlikeable characters, and his story is long and boring. I'm sure it has literary merit, I just can't work up enough enthusiasm to find it. But, as with Death of a Salesman, I wanted to know what it was about so mission accomplished.