How much should teens be required to read for homework in an English class?

I'm not sure about how much, as the amount I read voluntarily skewed way above average all the way from pre-school through high school, but I will say there should be a lot more [i]variety[/i] in what they are required to read. Year after year, my required reading list was nothing but heavy dramas about enduring hardships. Usually on the theme of losing the innocence of childhood, being black in the South during Jim Crow, or both. Had I not been positively exposed to books from a young age by my mother, I quite possibly might have ended up thinking there was nothing more to them than dreary doom and gloom. The obsession with "serious" literature is a plague.