I recently purchased a domain to start a new blog. I used the catchy title of a popular book in that niche in my domain name. The main book site comes up first on google and after that there are just a lot of fairly irrelevant links that come up so I'm hoping to squeeze into second position on the google search and take some of the traffic. So it would be like www.booknameblog.com. I checked out Canada and U.S. trademark databases and it's not registered so am I in the clear?
It would be trademark infringement - whether or not the owner decides to take action is unknown. You don't need to register a mark to have a trademark.
There are several reasons. Many people don't know about common law trademarks and think they only need to check the USPO - so it helps prevent infringement problems from starting. A federal registration establishes a filling date/usage in stone. A federal registration gives you the right to seek treble legal fees in an infringement case. A mark becomes uncontestable (except in cases of fraud) after about 6 years. Trademark rights start with first usage, not first to register, for a particular classification/usage. Your first post wasn't that clear. Does your blog have something to do with the book, or the subject of it? If your blog has absolutely nothing to do with book, then depending on the title of the book, it might be ok to use it. You mentioned wanting to ride their goodwill for traffic, and creating a blog about the book, or trying to create a likelihood of confusion would be infringement.
Mjewel : I didn't know that titles could have trademark rights... if the domain name is a common name and is the title to more than one book / album / etc., and you were to link to all the books that related to the title, would ALL of them then be able to sue you for trademark infringement? Seems iffy to me.... Also, to the OP, if you don't make any commercial use out of your site, there's nothing they can do about it... as long as you don't have commercial links, a critique/criticism site is protected under fair-use... so even if you had a super-strong mark like MicrosoftBlog.com, you can keep it without infringing the Microsoft trademark as long as you aren't using it for a commercial use.
This thread is actually pretty interesting for me because a few months ago I decided to change the name of my blog to "The Education of a Poker Player" which was an old poker book published back in the 1950s. I picked up the domain names "TheEducationofaPokerPlayer" and "EducationofaPokerPlayer" in .com and have been redirecting to my blog. After ready Mjewel's reply, my worry level of getting sued has gone from 0% to 0.1%.
Your situation is different than the OP's. Your site's name is descriptive and shouldn't pose any problem - especially since the book hasn't been in print for 50 or so years. Of course anyone can sue for anything.
Also, if you make it very clear that you are in no way affiliated with them and you are merely a fansite or something along those lines, you will have a better chance of not getting sued. However, you've already proven your intentions by saying you want to ride their name. A simple google searchwill probably pull this thread up in a couple weeks towards the top.
Ask some of the Harry Potter fan site owners what can happen if the author gets a bug up their butt and decides that they must control everything with their name on it..