The golden era of television may well be now.

Even if one watches “TV” on a computer screen or smart phone through a streaming service, a viewer can find a multitude of shows ranging in tastes, styles and levels of excellence.

And we can watch them episodically day after day, or once a week, or in one long binge session.

Television shows have become like novels. “Game of Thrones,” for example, each of the early seasons were literally based on one book or one novel in the series … at least until the series outpaced the publication of the books.

So, the argument goes that many TV series have become like novels, and feature films have become, by comparison, like short stories. Even the movies based on novels now, when compared to the detail and length of TV series, seem like beautifully crafted Cliff Notes.

Consider it this way: In the same time it takes to watch only one season of “Game of Thrones,” a viewer can watch more than four “Star Wars” movies – roughly half of the whole “Star Wars” saga can be viewed in the same time it takes to just get started watching the “Game of Thrones” series.

So, whenever embarking on five or six seasons – 50 or 60 hours – of a TV series seems too daunting, like facing a stack of thousand-page novels, it is a pleasure to sit back for only a couple hours and watch a movie, like reading a wonderfully crafted short story.

Which brings us to the book “Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders” by Neil Gaiman. It is a book filled with short stories that are fantastic in the quality sense and fantastic in the thematic sense.

Readers meet gourmands who have tasted everything but a “Sunbird.”

“A Study in Emerald” collides the Sherlock Holmes world of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle with the mystical realms of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulu.

Months personified gather to tell stories but what story will be told with “October in the Chair.”

Gaiman mixes short stories with poems, dreamscapes with bitter realities, dozens of tales, brief stops to faraway realms often as close as our own souls.

Gaiman is the author of the bestselling novel “American Gods,” which is slowly, tortuously being adapted and stretched into a television series, as well as the landmark “Sandman” comic books. And numerous other books and comics that have been adapted into movies with rumors of other TV series.

But for some fast-paced, fun, thought-provoking, cinematic in scope short stories of fantasy and the fantastic, “Fragile Things” is now showing in book stores and online everywhere.